Lockerbie case challenged

Friday

Jun 29, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 29, 2007 at 10:44 AM

LONDON -- An independent judicial review body ruled yesterday that a former Libyan intelligence official jailed for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing might have been wrongfully convicted and is entitled to challenge the verdict against him.

LONDON -- An independent judicial review body ruled yesterday that a former Libyan intelligence official jailed for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing might have been wrongfully convicted and is entitled to challenge the verdict against him.

The ruling by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission may have huge ramifications both legally and emotionally for the victims' relatives, reviving an array of questions and theories about the events leading to the explosion on Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988. The bombing killed 270 people, including 179 Americans.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former intelligence officer, was jailed in 2001 for the bombing after a trial under Scottish law at a special court in the Netherlands. He was the only person convicted in connection with Britain's bloodiest terrorist attack. Megrahi lost an initial appeal in 2002 and is serving a 27-year sentence in a Scottish prison.

Conceivably, however, a second appeal could mean that Megrahi would walk free, leaving the case formally unsolved.

After a three-year inquiry that produced an 800-page report, much of which is still secret, Graham Forbes, the chairman of the Scottish commission, said the panel was "of the view -- based upon our lengthy investigations, new evidence we have found and new evidence that was not before the trial court -- that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."

"The place for that matter to be determined is in the appeal court, to which we now refer the case," Forbes said in a statement. The commission is an independent public body that has the power to refer "any conviction or sentence passed on a person" no matter whether there already has been an appeal.

But the commission's decision "does not guarantee the success of the subsequent appeal," it said. Since its establishment in 1999, the commission said, it had received 887 cases to consider and had recommended that 67 of them be appealed. Of those appeals, 39 have been heard, with 25 of them ending in a reversal.

A spokesman for the Scottish commission, who spoke in return for anonymity under the organization's rules, said the next stage was for Megrahi's attorneys to present their case to the Appeal Court in order for a hearing date to be set.

The section of the commission's findings made public centered on evidence relating to purchases of clothing at a shop called Mary's House in Sliema, Malta, and reportedly wrapped around the bomb that blew up Flight 103. The explosive device was said to have been put on board a plane in Malta and transferred to a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to London before it was loaded onto Flight 103 at Heathrow Airport.

The original trial found that the bomb was hidden in a radio-cassette player placed inside a brown, hard-shell suitcase with clothing traced to Mary's House.

The trial court found that Megrahi bought the clothing at the shop on Dec. 7, 1988. But, the Scottish commission ruled, new evidence suggested that the clothes had been bought before Dec. 6, 1988, when there was no evidence that Megrahi was on the Mediterranean island.